A hand up from across the globe
Queen’s grads, Congolese man help send 236 kids to school
They’re at a window table at the Pour House pub: two young white guys who have graduated from Queen’s and a middle-aged black man in shirt and tie, who’s eating fries as they pore over lists of names.
It’s the unlikely setting for a meeting of a shoestring non-profit organization that has paid for 236 young boys and girls to go to school in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Four years ago, Spencer Goodwin and Jon Skarsten were undergrads — Goodwin in international development, Skarsten in commerce — when they met Congolese immigrant Aristide Burume at a church in Kingston, Ont.
The former Earl Haig Secondary School classmates were inspired by this father of six. Burume came to Canada only in 2006, yet managed to find enough money from driving cabs and waiting on tables to wire some of it back to his village of Nyantende in poverty-stricken eastern Congo, to help street children to go to school.
“When I see the misery, the suffering of these children on the streets and I know I can send 40 children to school for about $100 a month, what else could I do?” said Burume.
Keen to “give back,” the two students formed a grassroots foundation with Burume to support his project. Since then, with donations from friends, fundraising by Queen’s University student groups and the profits from a tour of a friend’s folk music group, the Birds of Bellwoods, the Nyantende Foundation now sponsors 114 elementary students, 119 high school students and three university students in Nyantende.
They’ve insisted that almost half the students they sponsor are girls.
“Bwenge is an interesting story,” said Goodwin, pointing to a name on the list of students they sponsor. “She’s in secondyear university now, taking economics. But when we visited two years ago she showed us her results on the national tests, which were really high, and told us she was a good student, but her parents were dead and she had to take care of her little sister, so she wondered if we could support her.”
Skarsten points to another name. “Here’s Asifwe — he just needed one more year of teacher training but had run out of money, so we were able to fund him and now he teaches math at one of the schools where we sponsor students.”
With Goodwin heading to Nyantende later this month, the discussion at the Annex pub ranges from which students he might visit and how many skipping ropes and hackysacks he might take along, to whether their budding aid organization might also be able to fix up some school buildings.
“The village has known a lot of killing, and there are a lot of orphans on the street from Rwanda who don’t have any help and can’t afford to go to school,” said Burume, 48, who has studied business as well as community service and justice at St. Lawrence College since arriving in Canada.
Burume is looking for a job in marketing.
“When we went over in 2013, some of the students we sponsored cried in front of us, they were so happy; if our foundation was not there, they would not be able to go to school,” said Burume, whose oldest child is heading this fall to the University of Manitoba to study aviation.
“They really need help in the Congo; most schools are in bad condition and we’re hoping to construct new ones. Some could collapse.”
As childhood friends, Skarsten and Goodwin had long hoped to do humanitarian work, but wanted the front-line experience of their own startup.
“Spencer and I had done some humanitarian work in high school and we wanted to do something grassroots,” said Skarsten, now a financial analyst.
Added Goodwin, who works as a server at Second City Comedy Theatre: “Jon and I loved the idea of helping other kids who don’t have the opportunity to go to school.”
We can’t cover every cost, but we can provide $1,500 in school supplies, so each student gets a dozen pencils, one eraser, two big booklets and one small,” said Goodwin.
“But there’s more we could do. We had eight of our students graduate last year but could afford to send only one to university.”